Even when I knew I was doing it just to kill them, getting close to other people without putting at least a little truth into the act was impossible for me. I started worrying about that habit right around my fifth or sixth assignment. Thought it had to mean I was giving too much away or revealing myself in a way that was going to impede my mission. As I watched my twelfth assignment waste her last breaths choking on the name she'd given me as if that would make sense of what I'd done, I realized it made me excellently suited to being an Executioner.

It didn't matter what the individual's tastes were. A grain of sincerity and a glimpse of vulnerability and voila: defenses were down. It was easy to give off the impression I was trying to be brave. I was, of course. But all androids were trying to be brave in one way or another. Faltering didn't so much appeal to their sympathies as it appealed to the miserable solidarity we all had in common, and it never crossed any of their minds that I was trying to be brave about a different but equally shitty business.

I learned to lean into it.

What I didn't learn was how to deal with being affected by that same sincerity when it wasn't all tangled up in lies. My targets knew peeks at the real thing. I, on the other hand, got a pretty good look into most of them. Some of them had gone cold, and some were warm; some couldn't get as close as they wanted to me, and others welcomed me into their arms in ways I couldn't keep and never felt I deserved.

A couple of them were so bright inside I would catch myself staring at something beautiful and remembering them long after they were dead.

And today was a beautiful fucking day.

Taking smaller and more obscure side roads, we'd ended up in the middle of nowhere out on the edge of Sector F. The mountains had given way to hills so lazy they couldn't be bothered to roll—they just flowed vaguely between equally modest altitudes. Tall, skinny trees pocked the terrain, occasionally in forest clusters full of noisy birds. The sunlight was starting to take on a barely perceptible tint and the shadows had grown long, but summer warmth was on the air. A pleasant breeze wafted in from the east under a sky without a single cloud.

There were no signs that civilization had ever been out there, but there were signs of war. Small pools with muted rainbows of pollution slicking the surface. Machines dropped in place with their external casing rusted through, exposing their innards like petrified animal bones that no predator could eat. A small abandoned camp in the shade of a rock formation half-hidden by how high the grasses had grown around it.

49 gingerly pinched at the remains of a tarp fluttering in the wind. "Nothing here either."

I hummed without any real thought behind it, just to let him know I was listening.

"I don't want to go too much further…" He turned back the way we'd come. "We might just have to accept we're finally out of gas."

That was a risk we understood when we started driving on back roads. Not the end of the world. "Let's head back then. We'll take a break once we get V back here since at least we know the area's clear and we can use this spot as a camp."

He nodded and mumbled over his shoulder. "Pod, mark this spot on my map, would you?"

A click from inside his pack provided non-verbal affirmation.

Our internal maps of the area weren't very good. Not that they needed to be since there wasn't anything out here. A herd in the distance milled along, chewing at the yellow-green grass without paying us any mind and that was about as much excitement as we'd seen since we left V to scout ahead.

Something had been on my mind for most of the trip, but to ask was to offer up that all-important grain of sincerity to someone I wasn't planning to kill while my own death was several months away at best. Most of my nastier truths were already out in the open with him, but those weren't personal to me. This was.

I opened my mouth.

"We're almost to Sector E-H, right?" asked 49. "Do we need dog tags?"

Dammit. "What for?"

"32S' description of androids in the central H sectors said almost all of them wore dog tags."

"32S has actually been to that area? Like, personally?"

"It was during the Normandy salvage missions. He had a habit of being overly helpful with the Resistance so he was always getting hurt to keep them safe or going somewhere he wasn't required to."

My thought routines stuttered. Without acknowledging the jealousy drilling a hole through my gut, I said the first innocuous small-talk string of words I could put together. "Bet he wasn't popular with the Healers."

49's smile was wistful, and his voice wasn't fully steady. "Probably not."

For a few moments, there was only the crunch of our boots in the grass and the slow, inaudible unclenching of my stomach.

"It wouldn't be a bad idea," I said, eventually. "But tags are personal. You know what they're for?"

"Identification," he answered quickly. "Common androids have unit addresses, but those aren't easy to read after death like YoRHa ID circuits, so they use an external accessory. Humans soldiers used to wear them, so androids just adopted the system."

He sounded pleased. Scanner-typical chatter was a luxury while he pretended to be a regular android.

"You know why there's usually more than one copy?" He slowly shook his head. "It's so their friends can take one off the corpse to remember them by. They're ID, sure, but it's way more important that they're mementos." I laughed, but it had the same watery quality as 49's 'probably not'. "Apparently once you get centuries old, you start to not remember everything even if your components are all intact and you have plenty of unused memory storage."

"We probably…should leave them then, right?" He receded briefly into his own thoughts. "…If we found any, I mean."

"Yeah. We're only a few years old. We can get away with not having any."

He didn't say anything else. The breeze sighed by.

I'd learned the hard way that it was sometimes harder to have a conversation with 49 than it was to have one with V. That same framework that let us work together so fast also created a weird, rigid distance between us. Or maybe that was just me and I only felt that way now because I actually wanted to talk to him.

I opened my mouth again. Hesitated. Tried to be brave.

"So when you met V did you also have that thought that you wanted to kill him?"

Suddenly my boots were the only ones crunching down the slope. My jaw tightened. I stopped and waited, and when no answer came, I gritted my teeth and turned to face 49, ready to find him with his weapon drawn.

Instead, I found him standing there like a startled deer. His shirt was puffed up where his auxiliary vents had opened wide to vent excess heat.

"Oh." My voice sounded far away and numb. "So it wasn't just because I'm an E model."

"Was that what you thought?"

"What the hell else was I supposed to think?" He didn't come up with a retort for that. I wished he had. I was full of strange, buzzing energy. "What was it like for you?"

"Well, I mean—" he floundered. "I'd just found out he was human, so I was really overwhelmed. And I was in bad shape. I dunno if I wanted to kill him, exactly, but I did end up taking him somewhere I thought he'd get hurt."

Passive-aggressive, but I still counted it. He wasn't designed for combat; of course he wouldn't think to do it with his own hands. "It didn't feel fair, right?"

"I—yeah? It was like I had to keep going because he was right in front of me and my protocols wouldn't shut the hell up even though I was so tired. I was this close to being…" His lips pressed thin, and he let the obvious ending hang.

Dead. He was close to finally being dead after losing everything and learning everything and his reaction to a human yanking him back onto his feet was the same as mine was. Relief spilled through me like fresh coolant. That moment of sharp, visceral desire to kill him, which had been so much more intense than even my later desire to be killed by him, was… normal. Still fucked up, but it had nothing to do with me being an executioner. Hell, it wasn't even because I was a combat type. I was so light all of a sudden. I felt like I'd won.

Wasn't sure what I won, but I was too keen on enjoying it while it lasted to get hung up on details like that.

Passing over those sluggish hills, we made it back to the woods we'd come from. Our pace was brisk, but it was a walk rather than a run. He wasn't anxious or in a rush, and for once, neither was I. Maybe that was why something familiar caught my eye that I hadn't noticed when we passed that way the first time. A pop of color of the forest floor between the stretched shadows of the trees.

"What's up?" 49 asked as I slowed down.

I shuffled over and squatted in front of an overgrown berry patch, prodding at the serrated leaves that hid tiny, white flowers and fruit barely bigger than a fingernail. "These were growing in the castle before we left. V was busy trying to make nice with the dragon at the time, but he seemed interested in them."

"Are they edible?"

"Dunno." I remembered the small berries the previous Fern had ended up throwing away in a fit of frustration the moment she began to realize that she might want more than merely being useful. Those berries were pink. These were red as drops of blood. I picked one and held it up to the light, staring at all the little bumps along its surface. "I don't think they were ripe back then."

"They look pretty ripe now…" He bent over, looking at the berry with his hands on his knees. "Try it."

"Huh?" My face scrunched. "Why the hell would I do that?"

"Meat is meat and plants are plants," he said with a weirdly energetic smile. "But you sort of have to taste fruit to know if it's really any good."

I stared at him and his obnoxiously glowy smile, my lips slowly curling back as I leaned away from him. "Oh my God, were you eating those oranges back in the grove? Even the old me didn't think about eating V's food. What are you, one of those humanity fetishists?"

"Hey, he gave it to me! And I—! Wait, wait, what the heck is a humanity fetishist?!"

I hooted so hard I nearly lost my balance. "Can't wait to wow you with the answer to that question, but that's another lesson for another time. Come on, we're almost there."

V was lounging in the back of the truck when we made it back. As he usually was now that the weather was good. I still found it weird a guy who'd gotten into so much shit in the weeks between meeting me and leaving the ruins could be good at lazing around. I could see the handle of his cane moving in an idle rocking motion. His voice was a low, pleasant rumble beneath the sound of the breeze in the canopy.

"I see those lights among the leaves; yourselves I see, sedate and wise. And yet some finer sense perceives… a presence that eludes the eyes."

I hoisted myself up over the trick wall. Instead of his book, he was holding a flower in one hand. "You reciting your poetry to plants now?"

9S poked his head up beside me. "Hm? Oh, that's...! Where'd you manage to find a lunar tear?"

The cane moved in a circular gesture to the woods around us and V sat up. "I gather your search was not so fruitful."

"We didn't find any gas, no." I tossed the little red berry I'd plucked into his lap. "But it wasn't totally fruitless."

He stared down at it like he couldn't decide whether his assuredly smartmouthed reply should be about the joke or the circumstances that had me carrying around exactly one berry. 49, meanwhile, actually laughed as he rounded to the other side of the truck.

"That was awful," he groaned. "I thought 42S was the only one who made jokes that bad!"

"You're the only one laughing," I pointed out, and gave the truck two quick raps. "Let's get packed up and get moving."

As I stepped down, I happened to glance back at V.

Over the growing expanse of summer that separated us from the city ruins, he'd somehow become even less expressive than before. Bored, preoccupied, and vaguely annoyed were his general moods; everything else was an outlier at this point. So to see the smile he cracked at that tiny red berry completely devoured my attention. It was crooked, a smile wearing a smirk's angles, but it reached his eyes revealingly.

It was the way I smiled sometimes when I caught myself remembering difficult things on beautiful days. Private and amused and a little wounded. I knew 49 reminded him of his kid back at home, but I wondered just who it was he was thinking of as he ate it.

"How is it…?" I asked.

"Strawberry," he answered matter-of-factly, and I knew it was an important detail in a story about him that I didn't know. "It's sweet."

He looked my way. Maybe it was the good weather or the flower or whoever he was thinking of, but he didn't bother putting his guard back up.

I was bad at remaining unaffected when other people showed me glimpses of themselves without any pretext or intent. Twenty-two targets, and thirteen names and I'd never learned.

And it was such a terribly beautiful day.